Suis-je Charlie? Muss ich Charlie werden? Why am I not Charlie?
Perhaps I am *not* Charlie, but if I am not Charlie, then I *must* be Ahmed!

I have often (well, at least occasionally) loved Charlie Hebdo with a love that brought pain to my heart (due primarily to having a diaphragm seized with convulsive laughter at the pricking of an inflated pope or politician). But I never wanted to *be* Charlie because the sharpness of his humour was often (well, at least occasionally) more than I wanted to express. Does the revolting incident in Paris now obligate me to take on a persona that is not my own in order to preserve the right of free expression?
Do I have some obligation to carry forward any benign message that is not my own but would otherwise be suppressed? What if the message was not benign? - eg if the victims were holocaust deniers?

When a man-killing lion is brought caged to my village I bear it little sympathy and in truth would dispatch it quickly if I could. But (unless I am overwhelmed with shameful revenge for attacks on my nearest and dearest) I have no urge to torment it. So when the slavering monster strikes out through the bars of the cage and catches one of the tormenting boys who have been poking it with pencils, why should I feel the need to take that boy's place and start a poking that I was not doing before? Of course I should not. But perhaps this is different. In this case the beast has a mind with malicious purpose and killed the boys as a threat to prevent others from playing a game that was doing it no real harm.

If someone uses threats to deny me the right to go where I do not now need to, does my failure to challenge his proscription encourage him to keep on expanding his claims until, when I start to feel the pinch, I discover that all my freedom to move has been taken and that the beast is engorged and empowered with resources? Do I stand with the Czechs? the Poles? or wait til the French are also gone? (Actually I guess only the first and last turned out to be feasible in 1939.)

I never wanted to draw Mohammed in carnal knowledge of a pig (I don't think Charlie ever did that either - and actually it was some Muslim cleric who circulated those images as a false purported example of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons). And I still don't want to (though I may have had a brief vengeful thought in that direction on first news of the killings). What I really want to do is draw or evoke in words an image of his spirit with a shocked look of shame and a tear in his eye[*]. Should I now be concerned that some rabid fuckhead might want to kill me for that?

Is an image of Benjamin Netanyahu's face on the head of a cockroach anti-semitic?
Would it be so if it was part of a larger image of all world heads of state similarly disposed?

Is it anti-islamic to point out that Islam is the only major religion in the modern world whose *current* adherents include a non-negligible fraction who endorse the rape of an innocent child as a punishment for some alleged offense of her parent? or which is the state religion in places where abandonment of the religion is punishable by death?

How could *any* truly faithful followers of a prophet who forbade them to idolize his image convert that proscription into the idolatrous prohibition of any kind of mockery?